Setback of liberalism

The 1880s saw the defeat of the People’s Right movement and the subtle change of emphasis in the ideas of its protagonists. Nakae Chomin (1847–1901), a student of the Iwakura Embassy who had earlier parted company with the official body and had seen some of Paris and Lyon of the post-Commune days, came to believe in republicanism. In 1881 he edited a radical newspaper and in the following year brought out his own translation of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Du contrat social, which inspired the participants of the Chichibu peasant war. In an analysis of the movement that had come to a deadlock

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(The Discourse of Three Drunkards on Government (Sansuijin-keirinmondo), 1887) he seems to have accepted the fait accompli by the government, and argued that the people’s right once granted should grow through care and energy into a people’s right as magnificient as the one won by the people. Baba Tatsui (1850–88), Fukuzawa’s student and Chomin’s friend, who had spent several years in England studying law, became an editor of the Liberal Newspaper (Jiyu shinbun) (Chomin was another editor) in which he wrote extensively on freedom of thought and action. When such freedom was denied to him by government suppression, he chose the life of a political exile in the USA, where

he met an early death. Some chose the life of the apostate. Kato Hiroyuki, whose reference to the Emperor as a man was strongly repudiated by a nationalist scholar of the Mito school, soon recanted and in his new writing on people’s right (1882) attacked the idea of natural right, upholding the Spencean theory of natural selection and calling for efforts to extend ‘the influence of the imperial throne’.

Indeed the collapse of the popular movement turned some of its theorists to nationalism and expansionism, which had existed as an under-current in their aspirations. Oi Kentaro (1843–1922) belonged to the radical wing of the Liberal Party and stood by the poor and downtrodden, advocating what virtually amounted to universal suffrage. At the height of the movement, he was involved in an unsuccessful plot (known as the Osaka Incident of 1885) to help the Korean reformers.

After a period of imprisonment he founded a new party called the Oriental Liberal Party (Toyo jiyuto) in 1892, which advocated a tough foreign policy to enhance ‘national right’ and to extend popular rights. Fukuzawa Yukichi, who had deplored the daring and sometimes violent acts of the local agitators at the time of the radicalization of the movement, began to approve the role of the throne as a focus of people’s loyalty, paying increasingly greater attention to the need for national ‘independence’. He aired such loyalist sentiments in a newspaper of his own, News of Contemporary Affairs (Jiji- shinpo) in the eighties. In 1884–5, at a time when an attempt by progressive Koreans, some under Fukuzawa’s influence, to set up a reformist government in Seoul proved abortive and Japan and China were brought to the brink of war over Korea (it was avoided by a compromise reached by the Tientsin treaty of April 1885), Fukuzawa wrote an important article titled ‘Exit Asia, Enter Europe’ (Datsua-ron) in his newspaper. There

he argued that Japan had liberated itself from Asian narrowness and obscurantism, and had moved into the Enlightenment of Western civilization, while China and Korea remained fettered by their Confucian code of life and were destined to be divided up by the advanced Western powers. So Japan ‘should treat China and Korea not with special favour as neighbouring countries but in the same way as the western powers would treat them’. On one level this would mean that feudal values were to be replaced by utilitarianism. On another it meant more: the East Asian international order with China at its centre (Middle Kingdom), to which Korea subscribed and which Japan had opposed with its own version of a Japan-centred middle kingdom, was to be replaced by the Western order of international relations based on international law but increasingly assuming the character of imperialist rivalries.

Encyclopedia of nineteenth-century thought 340

Setback of liberalism